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The Beginnings of a TLD Free-For-All?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bad-ideas dept.

Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "According to the BBC, ICANN is considering opening up the wholesale creation of TLDs by private industry. While I'm sure this is done for the convenience of the companies and has nothing to do with the several thousand dollars they will be charging for each registration, I was curious what the tech community at large thought about this idea. It seems to me that this will simply open the doors for a never-ending stream of TLD squatters."

3 of 489 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Worst idea ever by lilomar · · Score: 5, Informative

    When was the last time a multi-million dollar corporation was embarrassed about anything?

    Corporations are just like people, except, you know, completely different.

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  2. Misquoted by the BBC by Myrddin+Wyllt · · Score: 5, Informative
    I actually listened to the original interview on Radio 5 Live (lunchtime today), and Dr Twomey's comments seem to have been taken out of context.

    Firstly, the interviewer started under the misapprehension that domain names were running out, which Dr. Twomey corrected, and said the problem was with IPv4 addresses. The following comments then followed, which concern the introduction of IPv6:

    Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of Icann, told BBC News that the proposals would result in the biggest change to the way the internet worked in decades. "The impact of this will be different in different parts of the world. But it will allow groups, communities and business to express their identities online. "Like the United States in the 19th Century, we are in the process of opening up new real estate, new land, and people will go out and claim parts of that land and use it for various reasons they have. "It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet." This is included in TFA, where it is implied that he was referring to domain names.

    The comments he actually made about DNS and TLDs were much tamer, mainly relating to internationalization and the use of unicode URLs.

    I listened to this while driving, so I may have misunderstood slightly, but there was definitely no sense of "OMG TLD free-for-all" in the interview as broadcast.

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  3. Re:Worthless by Noren · · Score: 5, Informative

    Your logic that .com was so large to make .net pointless to create makes no sense considering they were created at the same time. (January 1985)

    It took years for .com to take off, there are fewer than 100 currently registered .com domains that date back to the first two years of .com's existance. Both .com and .net were rare to see in the late 80s to early 90s anyhow- .edu was much more common on USENET, or IRC, or on internet games such as netrek. Hell, .mil seemed about as common as .com in the early days.